As mentioned earlier, this chapter is constructed according to the emerging themes and content analysis that provide a sharper and more explicit focus on women's own voices, which is the central aim of this book. Most of the extracts in this chapter are derived from focused interviews and all the different data sets that were used in the discussion. The research process for this study was as follows:

Thus, the four randomly selected colleges were best divided into four economic classes: upper, upper-middle, lower-middle and working. The focused group interview women sample did not allow me to mention their real names in this study. Therefore, I used fake names: Nawal (from Jinnah (upper class), Gulalai (from Home Economics (upper-middle), Aiman (from Frontier (lower-middle) and Kiran (from City (working); however, the director of education allowed me to mention the real names of the colleges (see Appendix I for their brief social background information). It is important to emphasise here that to gain deeper insights, I conducted the interviews in local languages, and I translated them verbatim, as one of the central aims of this book is to allow women's voices to be heard. Three of the interviews took place in their college and one at the sample woman's house; the selection for the interview was purely on a voluntary basis from the initial Survey sample.

Methodological Aspects of This Study

It is unlikely that women's colleges in Peshawar would allow male researchers access to female students’ experiences and thoughts. Hence, my gender, religion, nationality and education were important factors that made this study possible. Due to the then political situation of Pukhtunkhwa, the administrators of educational institutions were reluctant to share information about the educational institutes. Therefore, the principals of the girls’ colleges were understandably cautious about my research and did further security checks before allowing me to commence my study, because they feared that collecting young women's (20–25 years old) thoughts and ideas would probably have a negative influence on the women students themselves. Thus, I selected both quantitative and qualitative methods, as both methods can be used to enhance the findings.